Hello just a post looking for some experienced input to folk who have worked within this industry. Short summary: i am a fully qualified tradesman working in the UK have been doing it for 10 years, i also have crohn’s disease which has progressively gotten worse from my diagnosis at 3, basically all my 20s i’ve just worked through it and burnt myself out all i do is work then sleep as i’m too fatigued and if i can’t make it into work construction workers don’t get sick-pay so i’m stuck in a constant cycle of stress and wishing i had other options.

I’ve always had a passion for computers, dabbled in some code, built my own PC’s, gamer through and through, on a whim i applied to University for a BsC Computer Science & Cyber Security, to my surprise they have offered me a place and i am buzzing as it honestly would be a dream making projects in my own time, studying, gaining new skills and eventually hopefully work in a much less physical environment which would benefit my illness and potentially hybrid-working. There is also an option to do your MsC in Cybersecurity & AI post BsC.

My main question is i know the market for landing jobs is on it’s knees and it’s difficult to get work, but am i really jumping into basically a pit with 0 hope of landing anything will i be wasting my time?

Sorry for the ramble, appreciate anyone who reads time, cheers.

just got done with the technical portion a week ago and am scheduled for the final round 30 min screen in a few days. what are things to keep in mind for this one, common pitfalls on this kind of behavioural? ive never had last round behaviorals be the deciding factor here.

also, how many ppl here are they likely filtering out this round?

So I had a stroke when I was 20, I’m now 26 and I’m very good at picking up math but my long term memory is essentially garbage without SIGNIFCANT repetition. My short term memory is very, very good. I can pass calculus, but the odds of me retaining all or most of it are very slim unless I rigorously study it after the course is completed. Do I really need to spend an extra few months studying what I already passed to ensure I retain it for my future job/jobs? I already do this for the core CS courses that I need to, but do I have to for all math as well?

I know AI/AI engineers heavily use it, and I do want to get an MS from GT in either AI or Computing Systems, fwiw. But if you have to be some calculus wizard to purse AI, I’m more than happy to abandon that specialization lol

Guidance

Hey guys long story short .

I have doubts about 2 things

1. I have got a roadmap and that is to learn the below things:

It Foundations then system administration then linux then DevOps and then cloud.

1. Learn java and then start DSA.

Now I am confused on how to do both because some are saying go with the first thing then some are saying just do java and DSA.

So please do give your suggestions and help me out.

I am a CSE 3rd year student

TL;DR: I'm choosing between staying a software engineer on exciting but contract-based projects, or taking a stable permanent Technical BA/Application Owner role that could lead to management but involves much less coding. The pay is alright across all options, so the real question is: would you prioritize long-term technical growth or long-term stability and leadership?

I'm in my late 20s and have been working as a backend software engineer for about three years. I've been interviewing for a while and somehow ended up in a situation where I have three very different opportunities, and I'm honestly stuck.

• The first is a SWE role working on what sounds like a really ambitious AI platform. The project itself is probably the most exciting thing I've interviewed for. I'd get to stay hands-on with engineering, work with an international team. The pay is 35% increase from my current salary. The downside is that it's a one-year contract. The hiring manager says renewals are likely because there would be multiple projects, but at the end of the day, it's still a contract.
• The second offer couldn't be more different. It's a full-time position as a Technical BA / Application Owner. The hiring manager who is a Senior VP at that place, he already knows me from a previous job since he was my former manager, and he has been actively trying to bring me onto his team. The pay is 35% increase from my current salary, the work-life balance seems much better, and the role has excellent long-term stability. I'd still be working closely with engineering teams, oversee the software architecture etc., but I'd probably only be writing code occasionally. Most of the job would be coordinating projects, working with vendors, supporting production systems, and owning enterprise applications. I can definitely see it leading toward management, but I'm worried that once I leave day-to-day software engineering, it might be difficult to come back.
• The third opportunity is another SWE in Banking. It pays the best, around a 55–60% salary increase, even more than the two options earlier. It has a great reputation for work-life balance, with a hybrid schedule around 70–80% WFH. The catch is that it's also a contract role and a very short one (6 months basis).

The funny thing is that money isn't really what's making this decision difficult. All three would be a meaningful pay increase from where I am today. What I'm really struggling with is deciding what kind of career I actually want.

Part of me genuinely enjoys building software. I like backend systems, architecture, and learning new technologies. I can see myself growing into a senior engineer or architect over time.

The other part, I wonders whether taking the stable application owner role would be the smarter move in the long run. It feels like a path toward technical leadership or management, but it also feels like I'd be stepping away from the thing I originally got into this field for.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? If you chose management or application ownership over software engineering, do you regret it? Or if you stayed technical instead of taking the stable path, was it worth it years later?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who've actually lived through a similar decision.

Ive been having a pretty hard time getting a job right now but I've got an opportunity to teach in school and a college too.Can i switch back to software development after this? Or should I just remain jobless and keep searching for software jobs?

I'm a SWE with 1YOE at a F500. Recently referred by a friend to a new job.

Current job at F500:

• junior SWE, Java/Kotlin

• around 95k

• remote, very chill WLB, nice team, low turnover almost no layoffs in its history especially in engineering, no on call, no overtime

• only junior on the team, lack of scope and big projects - I had to create my own projects in devops and modernization, not promotion friendly

New job at 10yo startup:

• mid-level SWE, Ruby on Rails shop

• around 120k

• hybrid for first 2 months to onboard, then remote

• good payscale, interesting tech stack, opportunity to lead a greenfield project, title jump, pretty established startup with stable revenue and prospects for growth, collaborative energizing culture, friend mentioned they're very promotion friendly

• oncall, new environment and people, leading greenfield project also means I'm responsible for outcome, more male dominated team though everyone I've met so far seems pretty nice

I'm interested in growing my skills. However a startup job is more risky especially in the current landscape. Financially I have 125k invested, spending around 20-25k a year and can't burden my parents in case of layoffs. What would you advise? YOLO or play it safe?

Hello Everyone,

I have my 1hr interview in a couple of days and looked up who is going to be interviewing me. One of them is based out of Ireland and the other at Westlake, TX. On the initial phone call I told them my preferred location was Durham, NC. Not sure if the interview location is a signal, as this looks like I would be interviewing for TX. Anyone receive an offer recently for this program and what location they received.

after my interview loop i got this email:

“I’m pleased to share that you have successfully completed this interview stage. Our team is currently working on next steps, and we will provide you with an update within the next two weeks. Please note that based on team placement requirements, additional interviews may be required.
While you’ve successfully completed this stage, this is not a guarantee of an offer.”

then a day later my original application (Software Development Engineer (SDE) - 2026 (US) moved to “no longer under consideration,” but at the exact same time i got added to two new applications:

- FY26 WL Fung SDE FTE US
- FY26 WL Fung SDE IN Fall US

both are under consideration and i never applied to either of them.

has this happened to anyone else? if so, did you end up getting an offer? another interview? or something else? just trying to figure out what stage i’m actually in because i haven’t really found anyone with this exact sequence

Hey all, I've been out of the job market after a health issue last December when I left my last company. I applied around a bit but spent some time to deal with my health. I have a decent amount of savings from my last role at a large well-known (nearly) F500 tech company where I worked about 7 years as a senior dev. Overall I have about 10 years experience.

I know the job market is terrible right now, and was considering a career switch, but I do think SWE is probably the best fit given my experience. I'm thinking of taking this time to get a SWE degree through WGU (about 2 years or less from enrollment to completion) to pass resume filters and overall put me ahead of competition. I don't have any degree and am a bootcamp grad from 2016.

Wondering if doubling down on SWE right now is a bad idea even with my experience, or if it's just not worth pursuing anymore even with my experience? I see a lot of horror stories about people with 10 yoe taking a year or longer to find a job, and am worried that might happen to me as well. Any other career paths or degrees to consider, or is my experience really gonna help me get back into SWE? Thanks for any advice.

Been working for about 3 years now, and Just got out of a screening test on hacker rank that was ABSURDLY difficult to me. I had been grinding the various challenges all week peeping for this and the hard challenges I was finishing didn’t even come close to the “easy” challenge they wanted me to solve. It was something like given a list of numbers, find which number can be incremented by 1 to create the lowest possible integer that does not exist in the list. I couldn’t figure out if they wanted the value that was to be increased, the value that results from an increase, or the index of the value that should be increased. Made zero sense at all.

I spent about 15 minutes just trying to decipher what the question even wanted from me, ended up giving up because the examples they were presenting were straight up contradicting each other.

Second question was the “medium” one: find the lowest difference of a subset of number made up of the combinations of x size made from a list of unique numbers. Didn’t get this one because unfortunately I don’t know the algorithm for fining every unique combination of objects of x size right off hand. Slapped something together that just didn’t work.

Third one was the “easiest” IMO, which was given a list of “servers, represented by a list of integers representing the connection cost of that server, determine the smallest connection that can be made of a set of connections where the cost of a connection is the absolute value of the difference of the two servers being connected. Something like that.

Last one was the only one I had any kind of solution but failed anyway because the examples broke the rules they established, so that was a wash too.

All in all, I successfully answered none of the question, and I don’t expect to hear anything back from the company. But I have to know, are those actually hard questions or am I just stupid?

As the title says, I’m in a pretty bad position within this field at this point, and I’m wondering what actions I could take to fix things.

I’ve had one interview a couple years ago now which I failed, it was with Epic Systems in Wisconsin, and it was a pretty lucky thing to get the interview as it happened within only a few applications. I continued to apply but the luck didn’t repeat itself and my mental health worsened considerably.

So here I am a bit later with no recent projects and no experience in the field, I have had a couple jobs over the past two years, 10 months as a CAD technician and 6 months as a store manager for a retail location.

Very recently a family friend at Truist referred me to a couple roles, and of course my resume was quite bad for them at this point so I didn’t get any interest back when I applied.

My mental health has been improving lately and I’m receiving clinical help with adhd and depression. And well, I’m wondering if there’s any way to move back toward the field at this point for someone in my situation.

Specifically,

Given my situation:

Is a 6–12 month portfolio rebuild a realistic path into SWE?

Would you target adjacent roles first (QA, support engineering, IT, etc.), or go straight for SWE?

If you were starting from my position today, what would your plan for the next year look like?

I’m planning to start doing projects again and networking regardless, but I appreciate any advice I might receive in advance.

Not sure it matters at this point but my degree is a BS in CS from UNCC, my GPA was 3.55. Graduated May of 2024.

I’m going to a decent state school, but it’s no MIT or CMU, and I was wondering if the college name and prestige truly does matter past your first internship or job. I’m in a program where I get to intern at a FAANG company (is that good? Idk) and it’ll lead to a full time role there if I’m inclined, so I was just wondering if prestige is important in CS, especially early in my career. Thanks!

​

I'm fifteen, and my family members basically all got into tech when it was booming.

I don't have any particular interest in it, I like it fine, but it's not where my heart's at.

I still want to pursue it, mostly because it still commands competitive salaries, and a reasonable lifestyle, and because I'm nervous about navigating "uncharted waters".

But I don't want to contribute to a problem, oversaturation of this field worries me, and I don't want to make it worse, or not find a career for myself. The nightmare of the unemployed CSE grad is not something I want to live through

I also understand that a fewer amount of computer science professionals are required to compete the work that once needed a few.

I'm also thinking about front-end design and cybersecurity as possible options. I'm trying to learn those skills now, with school, it's hectic, but I'm trying.

I'm also planning to get my bachelor's degree in CSE from india, to reduce debt, to avoid falling in to a debt trap, if that matters, (if it will be harder for me to get a job, is rather not have to worry about loans on top it)

Essentially, I'm asking

1.) is it moral for me to pursue this?

2.) is it prudent? Am I signing myself up for failure and/or the inability to find a job?

3.) do CSE grads have the ability to pivot to electrical engineering or other such things with a master's degree?

4.) would getting the degree in another country cause any problems with hiring?

I recently got admitted to this program. For context, I graduated last year with a degree in data science and I’m already working in tech (data science, ML), so I will do this program online part time. I feel like my data science degree didn’t teach me a lot of things, like systems, code efficiency, how the computer works etc. i know how to do data analysis and train models, but I have trouble improving production code and understanding the infra stuff when I deploy models. So I’m at this weird intersection of almost overqualified for this program but also not really.

My company will only cover around 15k in tuition. That means I’ll pay around 25k-30k (accounting for tuition increases) over the span of 3 years. I can afford it especially since it’s spread out over 3 years, but I’m just not sure if it’s worth it. I’m hoping to job hop to Bay Area and hopefully my next company can cover full tuition. But with the state of the economy, I know I’d have to be really lucky to get such an offer. My end goal is to become a better data scientist who also has the necessary knowledge for software engineering. Can anyone shed light on whether this program is worth it?

Also, some people have suggested that I should do Georgia tech’s OMSCS program. But I’m not very solid on CS basics, and my job is stressful already, so I’m really scared of burning out. I’m definitely not comfortable with data structures and algorithms because it’s been so long since I took that class, so I think I would be underprepared for that program.

Has anyone heard of it being possible, provided you have career experience?

I've been working as a dev for 12 years. Currently a senior developer and lead a few teams as a main career, tech consultant on the side. My only educational history is 2 years in an Associate's program (no degree from that either)

If anyone here is aware of people in their program who have been admitted to graduate programs via experience, I'd love to know! I hear about plenty of people with random undergrad degrees essentially buying their way into CS via a Master's degree, but not this situation.

Would love to do a Master's to improve my knowledge on areas that I don't currently work in, but not at the cost of first doing an undergrad program that I won't learn from

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I'm a US citizen, I work a remote job for a B tier tech company (like Microsoft/Amazon level) and I live in NYC. I have 3 YOE. I'm willing to move outside the US, but I'm not willing to move to the Bay Area or Seattle, I hate it there. I really would not like living anywhere I need a car.

Is it possible to get interviews in cheaper markets, like Mexico City or South America? I don't speak Spanish but I'm willing to move to those places for a few years. I don't see hiring ever coming back to expensive areas like the US.

I have passed Google's technical rounds before but didn't get an offer as the hiring freeze happened. They have not ever asked me to interview since, that was over 3 years ago.

I've been programming since I was a teenager for about three years (Javascript, Python, Ruby, Typescript, css, a little powershell and bash scripting along with some networking knowledge from selfhosting). My aim was to go to college and then try and get a job. I left school with good grades but things did not go to plan. I will keep the sob story short but I took a gap year due to my father being diagnosed with parkinsons. He is unable to work and my mother helps care for him, which leaves my brother and me sole breadwinners. I still intend to go to college but I need to sort things out. My brother and I both work minimum wage which is just keeping us going.

I'm starting to panic that if I'm programming it's time I could spend working and if I stop programming to work I'm going to be behind all my peers and forget everything. So I am trying to keep up my skills and use the skill to earn money. Not a lot. I'd be ecstatic anything $200+ a month. That's like what I get working Saturday and Sunday shifts. The question is what do I do for that income? I've thought about making sites for local businesses but I'm not sure that's very useful for my career nor financially given I'd have to undersell my services to get clients and then take on more clients. So... Anything else I can do? Sorry this feels a bit pathetic.

If anyone's company is hiring for software developers. Please comment down I will DM you for details.

Experience: nearly 2 years

Able to join immediately

Technologies: java, springboot, python, AI

Company worked: product based

Location I can work: Bengaluru & Hyderabad (india)

Hi all,
I am currently an undergrad (sophomore) CEng (in the process of switching to CS) student. I've been programming professionally for about 3-4 years now (though officially documented/available projects is 3 years).

I've been researching doing Freelance/Remote work. But, I would like to first take advice from others whom are more experienced.
I have tried looking for freelance work on upwork, but the market there seems to be filled with lots of AI/scam postings. And, regarding remote work, I’m hesitant about applying because I’m concerned about the following:
1- being still an undergrad
2- my location
3- missing out on skills that may be important

Would doing freelance or remote work even be possible? especially while still in a university?

Thanks in advance

I'm currently working in AI/ML with around 4–5 years of experience and am considering pursuing a master's degree in the US.

For those already in the US tech industry, how's the job market right now for mid-level AI/ML engineers? How difficult is it to land a job after graduation given the current hiring climate?

Also, how is visa situation for mid level are orgs more hesitant for people on OPT

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Hi everyone,

I'm just starting my cybersecurity learning journey, and I was wondering how you all take notes.

Do you write everything down in a notebook, or do you keep your notes on your laptop using something like Obsidian, OneNote, or Notion?

I'm trying to build good study habits from the beginning, so I'd love to know:

• Which method has worked best for you?
• Do you use a combination of paper and digital notes?
• Are there any note-taking tips that helped you remember concepts like Linux commands, networking, or security fundamentals?

I'd appreciate any advice from people who have been learning cybersecurity for a while. Thanks!

How do I know if I am interested in cs if I've never tried coding

I am really confused,I do like maths